Film reviews: Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning, Lilo & Stitch, and Final Destination: Bloodlines

Mission: Impossible—The Final Reckoning

Directed by Christopher McQuarrie (PG-13)

★★★

At the very end of the eighth and allegedly final Mission: Impossible, Tom Cruise performs an airborne stunt on a pair of biplanes that will leave moviegoers "in an exhilarated state of awe," said Owen Gleiberman in Variety. "Up until then," though, Final Reckoning is "more of a churning slow burn," one that for two hours "grinds along with a furrowed-brow anxiety" as Cruise's Ethan Hunt battles an all-too-plausible AI entity that intends to destroy humanity. Still, this latest Mission: Impossible is "good enough to remind you how much fun it is when something is truly at stake in a high-flying, twisty-plotted, solemnly preposterous popcorn movie." A handful of secondary characters are delightful despite the script's staid dialogue, said Amy Nicholson in the Los Angeles Times. "But Cruise is the reason audiences will, and should, see Final Reckoning on a large screen." Even when performing the impossible, his Ethan "doesn't try to play the unflappable hero," which makes him appealing.

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Sadly, the rest of the film has "very little sense of play." The self-celebrating first third "drowns us in endless litanies about the many achievements of Ethan Hunt," said Bilge Ebiri in NYMag.com. Fortunately, "Final Reckoning does eventually recover from the calamity of its first hour to give us an entertaining, if still messy, Mission: Impossible movie." Like its predecessors, this one's "driven by Cruise doing his Buster Keaton best to look simultaneously graceful and ridiculous in extreme circumstances." The plane stunt is sensational, and the sequence in which Cruise explores an explosives-laden submarine "ranks among the series' greatest."

Lilo & Stitch

Directed by Dean Fleischer Camp (PG)

★★

"Did you ever wonder what Lilo & Stitch would look like if it were live-action, a lot longer, and not quite as good?" asked William Bibbiani in The Wrap. "A testament to low ambition," the revamp of Disney's 2002 animated classic retells the tale of Lilo, a young Hawaiian orphan who adopts a cuddly blue pet who happens to be an alien chaos agent on the run from intergalactic pursuers. Fortunately, "when you take something that works and make it work slightly less, it still kinda works."

Judged against what Disney could be doing with its creative capital, however, the movie is "just the latest in a string of soulless, cut-rate copies," said Jacob Oller in The A.V. Club. A "cheap-looking" paint-by-numbers redo, it offers "the janky fidelity of a community theater production," with two of its aliens now mostly masquerading as humans, one of them played by an "actively disinterested" Zach Galifianakis. Tweaks to the story also throw too much attention toward Lilo's older sister, who's burdened with dreary real-world problems. Still, "what the film does get right, and what matters the most, is its titular partners in crime," said Brandon Yu in The New York Times. Child actress Maia Kealoha and the CGI-animated Stitch "have the endearing chemistry that is needed to make the whole thing work." And "most of all, together they are very, very cute."

Final Destination: Bloodlines

Directed by Zach Lipovsky and Adam B. Stein (R)

★★★

The first new Final Destination movie in 14 years is "a rare franchise reboot that works as a stand-alone," said Michael Phillips in the Chicago Tribune. Credit the series' premise, which introduces a new set of protagonists every time, then has them hunted one by one by Death itself. The elaborate, Rube Goldberg–esque kills, which arrive via lawnmower, garbage truck, and other of life's mundane furnishings, are "quick and nutty," and almost every one is "clever enough to be funnier than it is cruel."

This new installment "embraces the knowingly silly premise and grisly thrills we've come to expect from the 25-year-old series," said Radheyan Simonpillai in The Guardian. But it improves on the formula because its "stunning" opening set piece, in which a disaster is thwarted at a restaurant in a Space Needle–like tower, makes every member of one family a target for Death's vengeance and also "playfully tinkers with the series mythology."

At one point, Bloodlines even turns profound, said Matt Zoller Seitz in RogerEbert.com. Tony Todd, an actor who appeared in four previous Final Destination films, was dying from cancer when he reprised his role as mortician William Bludworth. In a memorable scene, "he uses the inevitability of his death as fuel for his art, connecting the reality of death to its spectacular representations on screen." When the film isn't asking us to heed Todd's words, it "isn't afraid to go too far, and I mean waaaay too far." From the very start, it "keeps pushing the outer edge of the envelope, giggling the entire time."